Zomato takes down its porn site ad campaign

Online restaurant guide and food ordering service Zomato has taken down its porn site advertising campaign after just a week, because the company believes they might have crossed the "fine line between marketing irreverence and cultural insensitivity".

Earlier this week, Zomato had shared about a marketing campaign they were running on porn sites to tap into late-night delivery segment. It ran these ads on desktop and mobile sites, between 11 pm and 4 am and these appeared on video landing pages.

At the time, Zomato's SVP-Growth Pramod Rao said "The goal was clear - get people to click. Our strategy for this was fairly straightforward, too – create something that’ll take people’s eyes off the video, they’ll click the banner because they’re (obviously) getting hungry now, and then they’ll order online on Zomato".

Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said they were pretty pleased with the results, since it attracted a "lot of eyeballs, millions of clicks and a bump up in online orders at a ridiculously low cost".

However, since they shared the results of the marketing campaign on Tuesday, Goyal said some people felt the campaign was in poor taste "Some also said that all porn is not legal, and by advertising on porn websites, we are financially supporting abuse – certainly something we don’t want to do" he said.

Goyal added that while the campaign was "almost textbook 'startup' marketing, we’ve probably reached a stage where it’s fair to expect that even if we’re doing what we need to do, we do it in ways that are more grown up. We understand that we owe it to ourselves, and to those who’ve helped get us to where we are, to set the right examples and convey the right messages".

Goyal however noted "That isn’t to say that we’ll crawl into a shell and stop doing what’s needed. There will be growth hacks and marketing campaigns, and they may or may not be everybody’s cup of tea. But we will also be more mindful of the boundaries we’re playing inside."

Last year, Zomato had also conducted a marketing/hiring campaign wherein it had pitted Delhi against Bengaluru and had claimed that Delhi should be the tech capital of India, not Bengaluru. The campaign was later pulled down following outrage from Bengaluru residents on Twitter.

During a Reddit Ask me Anything session earlier this year, Goyal had said the "Bangalore campaign worked very well for us. Twitter outrage is cheaper than buying media or hiring recruitment consulting firms."